Nice introduction to Todd Hido’s work
Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco
Stephen Wirtz Gallery is pleased to present Excerpts from Silver Meadows, an exhibition of new photographs by Todd Hido. Sequenced to form an almost cinematic narrative, atmospheric landscapes of in-between, and isolated places in America provide the setting, and portraits of female subjects, broken starlets in suburban dress, stand in as the main characters. While the subject matter is mined from Hido’s own experience growing up in Kent, Ohio, what results is a collectively familiar, yet entirely imaginary and dreamlike melodrama untethered from a specific time and place, a visual pulp novel of Midwest mythology.
Silver Meadows itself is a real place—a modest Midwestern suburban development that grew and pushed into former farmland on the outskirts of Kent. The setting of Hido’s childhood, it also became the creative wellspring for his work. Compelled to contend with his personal history, Hido wanders deliberately yet randomly in search of imagery that connects with his recollections. In Excerpts from Silver Meadows, this memory-driven approach turns his personal history into an ethereal realm populated by the exquisite and the insidious. Collectively, these photographs present the artist’s metaphorical reckoning with his own past, while providing a majestic summation of the suburban childhood experience in general, where community can be constructed from whole cloth, and homes built similarly to convey stability actually conceal lives seething with sexual and psychological instability. From homes like these, generations of American teenagers have sought escape through the emancipating pleasures promised by sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.
Hido’s landscape work is made during lengthy road trips in which he sets up his camera and takes photographs often through the windshield of his car, essentially using the windshield as an additional lens. He often photographs during inclement weather, using a streaking, blurring visual effect produced by rain and snow as a veil to advance the mysterious and unsettling tone of the images.
On Hido’s recent publication A Road Divided, Photoeye.com states “Hido has long since secured his place among the most notable photographers of his generation, A Road Divided proves that reputation makes no unkept promises.”